Book Review: The Culture Code

My Rating: 🚀🚀🚀🚀, a fantastic window into how groups form, behave, execute and change

Overall: This is a really enjoyable read through the softer, cultural practices for executing great work. Two root concepts the books shares are pickup basketball & murmuration, great teams collaborate, flow, adapt, responding to small cues and patterns that drive them forward. Success isn’t about individual greatness, it is having people that execute in “High-purpose environments are filled with small, vivid signals designed to create a link between the present moment and a future ideal.”

Cautions: Some of the content is quite anecdotal, try to reflect on it and how it could apply back to your team. The book doesn’t give you models for thinking but comparable stories that you can learn from.

Recommended readers: Anyone who works in a team.

Teams teams teams, they are the foundation of executing in any ambiguous environment but how much time do we really spend designing them or thinking about how they should work? The culture code explores how great performing teams form, execute and co-exist. And importantly how they sustain through sharing belonging cues, psychological safety, clear shared purpose and a connection to the future solution.

Key Concepts:

• Safety, great teams need to feel connected, feel safe- “Cohesion happens not when members of a group are smarter but when they are lit up by clear, steady signals of safe connection.”
• Safety is constantly reinforced by “belonging cues” — reminders to the team that they belong, they are safe, they have a role
• Team members need to share vulnerability, enabled by the safety, so they can openly and honestly highlight blockers/ issues
• Purpose, in this stable environment, teams need a clear purpose and mission to anchor their activity and give it meaning

The organisations Daniel relates this to are the like of Seal Team Six, who need to execute at a fast, changing pace knowing that each person in the team can work together. He describes this as “pickup basketball”, a free-flowing reactive game where you call your own fouls and move at speed.

Relating back to corporate ventures, teams are often not designed, or contain a group of figureheads who are only there for temporary amounts of time with large reputations and egos to boot. They focus around executing the idea and not creating a team that can repeatedly execute ideas.

For anyone working in the innovation space, this is a good topic to mull over. How strong is the culture in your teams, do you reinforce safety cues, do you have team purpose?

The last concept from the book that really called out to me was his parallel to Starling Murmuration. How do these large groups of birds execute these seemingly choreographed aerial manoeuvres? the truth, each bird takes cues from the bird to its side, creating a system of cues that bend, stretch and guide the body in the air. Just like teams.